Doctoral Dissertation Research: Behavioral and Computational Investigation of Transitivity in the Acquisition of Non-Basic Syntax

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Within the first years of life and without explicit instruction, children acquire a linguistic system that allows them to combine sounds in order to express meanings. Studying this process illuminates how a cognitive system as complicated as language can develop in the human mind, and helps clarify the nature of learning in development. Learning in general requires building on prior knowledge: children can't learn arithmetic if they don't know how to count. This project asks how infants build on their prior linguistic knowledge at each stage of their development, using the limited amount of speech they are able to understand, in order to learn more about the structure of their language. By improving our understanding of how infants learn about their language at each stage in development, the project provides an important step toward understanding why and how the quantity and type of speech heard in infancy contribute to differences in children's later vocabulary and language performance, in school and later in life.This research focuses on the acquisition of "non-basic" clauses as a window into the incremental nature of language learning. Sentences like "What did Mary fix?" are potentially misleading for children in the earliest stages of syntax acquisition, who might not recognize that "what" stands for the object of "fix" and might think that this clause is intransitive. This work pursues the hypothesis that children may use knowledge about verb argument structure in order to identify non-basic clause types in their language. The research integrates approaches from different research communities, using behavioral experiments to investigate the developmental trajectory of non-basic clause acquisition, and computational modelling to evaluate whether the proposed mechanisms are feasible for learning from child-directed speech. Through this case study, this research aims to provide a fuller picture of what portion of the input is useful to an individual child at any single point in development, how children perceive that input given their current grammatical knowledge, and what internal mechanisms enable them to generalize beyond that input in inferring the grammar of their language. The project also includes outreach about issues in language development to local families and high school students from under-represented backgrounds.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.